The Australian Spec Fic Snapshot roundup of links – amazing work we managed this year, thanks largely to a much bigger pool of volunteers, who donated massive amounts of time and energy to pull it off. Hooray, especially to Tehani & Kathryn for organisation.

Far more likely to have been missed is this article on gender & genre in Australian publishing – a bunch of us female writers & editors in the Australian spec fic scene contributed to the article, which then appeared right when most of us were at the convention and thus forgot to link to it or plug it to our readers.

Meanwhile, on Pinterest, I’ve been curating up a storm, and am particularly proud of these recent boards:

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I have been, like many people, looking at this latest social media phenomenon from the outside in, and as I learned with Twitter and Tumblr, these things don’t always make a lot of sense until you jump in to see what the water feels like.

In fact, along with the media flurries about how Pinterest SHOCK has lots of women and SHOCK is the new big internet traffic light system, one of the most common comments I’ve seen about it has been “OMG I so don’t want to know what Pinterest is, one more social media is going to break me.”

Which, fair enough.

So I didn’t know much, going in, about it apart from, well, it’s about arranging pictures. And there’s a remarkably fan-lite community (cos, as Kaia remarked to me, they’re all still on Tumblr). I asked the universe to put the Galactic Suburbia books on a pinboard last week, and our listener Celia leaped into action, showing if nothing else that if the book selling industry really is going down the tubes, it’s not Galactic Suburbia’s fault.

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I think I actually swooned at this one – Ben Browder to guest star in Doctor Who – in a Wild West episode. SWOONED, I tell you! (now we just need Claudia Black to come in as Benny Summerfield and the world will be a perfect place)

This is one I meant to bring to the table at our recent recording of Galactic Suburbia (should be up tonight) but forgot: craft is at the top of the cultural activities performed by Australians, but our peak funding body for cultural activities has just defunded Craft Australia. (I didn’t even know there was a Craft Australia!) There’s plenty of gender & class privilege to unpack here, as there usually is when the line between craft and art is drawn.